Paleobiology's uneasy relationship with the darwinian tradition: Stasis as data

Abstract

During the late twentieth century and up to the present, paleobiologists' thinking about evolution has had an uneasy relationship with the Darwinian tradition. In this chapter, I use the concept of stasis as a guiding thread for exploring these tensions. Beginning in the 1970s, paleobiologists put stasis on the agenda of evolutionary biology, and in doing so, they challenged Darwinian tradition in at least three ways: (1) famously, the theory of punctuated equilibria implied that stasis, rather than gradual, selection-driven change, is the hallmark of evolutionary history; (2) subsequent attempts to explain evolutionary stasis have shown the limits of neo-Darwinian explanations that emphasize the power of stabilizing selection, pointing to the need for a more hierarchical approach; and (3) the issue whether stasis vs. change should be the default expectation for evolutionary systems remains unsettled.